#lit

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#literary-criticism #literary-theory #narrative #nineteenth-century #novels

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#language #literary-criticism #literature #truth #literary-criticism

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it. Groucho Marx ↗

— Timar

#literary-criticism #literary-criticism

Analogies are like lies. ↗

— Roman Payne

#lies #literary-criticism #literary-criticism

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name." (Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.) ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#literary-criticism #novels #the-davinci-code #writing #literary-criticism

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#literature #literary-criticism

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. ↗

— Trinh T. Minh-ha

#literary-criticism

The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#literary-criticism

Die Kunst des Rezensierens besteht nicht zuletzt darin, selbst über langweilige Bücher fesselnd zu schreiben. ↗

— Thomas Anz

#theory #literary-criticism

What the hell was she doing on the nonhostage side of a handgun? ↗

— Suzanne Brockmann

#humour #military-romance #romance #romantic-suspense #funny